An institution may create procedures to protect the quality of a decision. The risk begins when, gradually, it starts protecting the procedure from the very need to decide.<\/p>\n
On 10 September, the UK Cabinet Office announced the removal of consultations deemed unnecessary or merely formal, as part of an initiative intended to reduce administrative burdens considered counterproductive and accelerate public decision-making. The announcement raises a question that extends beyond administrative simplification: what happens when a mechanism designed to improve a decision begins to acquire a logic of its own, independent of the purpose that originally justified it?<\/p>\n
The Government states that it has identified around 7,000 consultation duties set out in UK legislation, using an artificial intelligence tool, and intends to remove those it considers unnecessary, while retaining formal consultation where there is a legal requirement, a matter of fairness, or a substantive reason for seeking external input.<\/p>\n
Modern institutions have long relied on procedure to constrain the arbitrariness of power. Rules, formalities and consultation mechanisms create distance between the immediate will of the decision-maker and the outcome of a decision. They make the exercise of power more predictable, more justifiable and, in certain contexts, more legitimate.<\/p>\n
But the rationality of a procedural system does not lie in the number of procedures it can accumulate. It lies in the relationship between form and the purpose that form is intended to serve.<\/p>\n
The literature on bureaucracy and procedural rationality has long recognised this tension: means designed to discipline decision-making can, over time, acquire a degree of autonomy from the ends that gave rise to them. A rule created to prevent arbitrariness can become an obligation to be fulfilled regardless of its utility; a mechanism intended to produce better information can turn into a stage that merely confirms that the mechanism itself has been followed.<\/p>\n
This is where some of the subtler paradoxes of complex organisations emerge.<\/p>\n
A procedure designed to introduce knowledge can become merely obligatory. A safeguard created to protect the quality of a decision can become a ritual of compliance. A consultation that originally exists to ensure that a decision is informed may continue to be repeated when there is no longer any new information capable of altering the substantive question.<\/p>\n
None of this means that the procedure was poorly designed in the first place. On the contrary, the paradox often arises from the persistence of mechanisms that remain formally legitimate after their function has changed, diminished or disappeared.<\/p>\n
When this happens, the institution gradually shifts its criterion of evaluation. Instead of asking whether the procedure continues to improve the decision, it begins to ask whether the procedure has been followed. The quality of the process becomes easier to demonstrate than the quality of the purpose that process was intended to protect.<\/p>\n
The shift is subtle, but its institutional consequences are profound.<\/p>\n
Institutional form has a force of its own. Once embedded in legislation, regulations, routines and organisational expectations, it ceases to be merely an instrument and becomes part of the environment within which new decisions are made. What was initially created to serve a particular purpose can become difficult to question precisely because its existence has itself come to be treated as evidence of its necessity.<\/p>\n
This is why simplification, when taken seriously, is not simply an exercise in reduction. It is an exercise in institutional discernment: distinguishing what still protects the quality of a decision from what merely preserves the form of a process.<\/p>\n
This distinction matters particularly to those who govern and make decisions within complex institutions, where each procedure can tend to generate further procedures, each safeguard can call for another safeguard, and each formal requirement can create the need to demonstrate that it has itself been formally fulfilled.<\/p>\n
The risk does not lie in the existence of rules, but in losing the capacity to question the purpose that continues, or no longer continues, to justify them.<\/p>\n
A mature institution does not need to choose between procedure and decision. It needs to preserve the relationship between the two, so that form continues to serve substance rather than, imperceptibly, replacing it.<\/p>\n
What truly marks procedural maturity is not the completion of more stages. It is knowing when a stage still protects the decision and when it begins, silently, to govern it.<\/p>\n
Cabinet Office, \u201c\u2018Box-ticking\u2019 consultations scrapped to speed up delivery\u201d, 10 September 2026. \u00b7 Complementary source: HM Treasury, Cabinet Office and Attorney General, \u201cThe Simplification and Agency of Government – Letter to all ministers\u201d, 7 September 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An institution may create procedures to protect the quality of a decision. The risk begins when, gradually, it starts protecting the procedure from the very need to decide. On 10 September, the UK Cabinet Office announced the removal of consultations deemed unnecessary or merely formal, as part of an initiative intended to reduce administrative burdens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1616,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,43],"tags":[],"autor":[42],"entrevistado":[],"local":[],"class_list":["post-1615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ler-o-presente","category-series","autor-daniela-teixeira"],"yoast_head":"\n